What if the thing you keep fighting is actually trying to help you?

‘Flipping heck, I’m fucking about again.’

We are remarkably good at finding sticks to beat ourselves with, and procrastination has to be one of our all-time favourites. It’s such a convenient one, too, because there is almost always something we haven’t done, something we should have started or something we could have done better. And whenever we need a bit of evidence to support our deeply held suspicion that we’re fundamentally inadequate human beings, procrastination is right there, ready to oblige.

For those of us with ADHD, it can be an especially effective stick because we so often know that we’re perfectly capable of doing the thing. We’ve done it before. Sometimes we’ve accomplished things considerably more complicated than the task currently defeating us, which makes our apparent inability to get off the sofa and send one bloody email all the more infuriating. We know what needs doing, we know the consequences of not doing it, and yet here we are, doing absolutely everything except the thing we’re supposed to be doing. Insert: ‘Come on, just do it, it’s tiny/ huge/ needs doing/ etc…’.

And then, of course, we start judging ourselves for procrastinating. We berate ourselves for being lazy, undisciplined, unreliable, for wasting yet another day. We spend an enormous amount of energy feeling terrible about the fact that we’re not doing something, while becoming progressively less capable of actually doing it. Excellent. Very efficient. 10/10 work here.

But what if we’ve got procrastination all wrong?

One of the fundamental principles I come back to in my work is that everything our brain does is protective. Our brain’s primary job is to keep us alive, and an enormous amount of what happens in there is concerned with anticipating threats, managing resources and making sure we survive whatever life decides to throw at us. It doesn’t always do this particularly elegantly, and some of its protective strategies can become spectacularly unhelpful, but there is generally a logic behind what it’s doing, even when that logic isn’t immediately obvious to us.

And if everything our brain does is protective, then procrastination must be protective too. Which raises a rather interesting question:

What is my procrastination trying to protect me from?

This is where I like to put on my anthropologist’s hat and get curious. Rather than immediately deciding that I’m being lazy, useless or spectacularly undisciplined, I can start looking at what’s actually happening and what might be behind it.

Because procrastination can be telling us several different things, and they don’t all require the same response. In fact, some of them might be telling us that we need to do considerably less, rather than more.

Let’s have a look at some of them.

1. I don’t have all the information

One of the most common reasons we get stuck is that we simply don’t have enough clarity to move forward.

We might think we know what the task is, but actually, somewhere along the line, there are questions we haven’t answered, decisions we haven’t made or information we haven’t gathered. Our brain encounters one of these gaps and, unable to work out how to proceed, quietly puts the brakes on.

This can be particularly frustrating when the task looks perfectly straightforward from the outside. You need to send an email, for example. How difficult can that possibly be? Except that you haven’t quite decided what you’re asking for, you’re not sure who needs to receive it, and you don’t know whether you should mention the slightly awkward thing that happened last week. There are actually several decisions hiding inside that one apparently simple task.

And while one part of your brain is shouting, ‘JUST SEND THE FUCKING EMAIL!’, another part is still trying to work out what the email is supposed to say.

I think this is where we can get confused about what procrastination actually is. We see the fact that we haven’t started, but we don’t necessarily recognise the unanswered questions standing in our way. We might spend ages trying to force ourselves to do something when what we actually need is a little more information.

Perhaps our brain is simply asking us to stop for a moment and figure out what’s missing. Maybe we need to ask somebody a question, gather some information or make a decision before we can reasonably expect ourselves to proceed.

2. There’s too much here

Closely related to the first one is the task that has become so enormous, complicated or poorly defined that we can’t find a way into it.

We’ve all been there. ‘Sort out my finances.’ ‘Get the house organised.’ ‘Write my book.’ These are the sorts of things we put on our to-do lists, as if they were single activities rather than enormous collections of smaller tasks, some of which contain another seventeen decisions and possibly a small existential crisis.

And then we wonder why we can’t get started.

There’s something quite interesting about the way we expect our brains to manage complexity. We often assume that because we understand the overall objective, we should automatically be able to translate that into action. But knowing where we want to end up doesn’t necessarily tell us where to begin, and for a brain that is already juggling quite a lot of information, that can be a substantial obstacle.

Sometimes the protective response is simply to stop engaging with something that feels too big to handle. It might be worth asking whether there’s a way of making the task more accessible, whether we can identify an actual starting point, or whether we need somebody else to help us untangle the whole bloody thing.

I think it’s also worth remembering that the size of a task is entirely subjective. Something that takes one person five minutes might take somebody else an enormous amount of preparation, decision-making and emotional energy. We tend to measure the difficulty of tasks by looking at what they involve from the outside, rather than the demands they place on the person trying to accomplish them.

And if our brain is telling us that something is too much, perhaps we could start by believing it, rather than immediately launching into an argument about why it shouldn’t be.

3. There’s nothing left in the tank

This is a big one, particularly for neurodivergent people, because we often have a rather complicated relationship with our own capacity.

We have a finite amount of energy available to us, fact, and that energy isn’t contained in one enormous battery that we can conveniently check every morning. We’ve got cognitive, emotional, physical, spiritual, social and sensory demands to contend with, and all of these can affect how much capacity we have available at any given moment.

You might have spent the morning in meetings, dealt with a difficult conversation, navigated a particularly unpleasant sensory environment or simply had a terrible night’s sleep. None of these things necessarily look like a productive day’s work, but they can use up an extraordinary amount of your available resources.

And sometimes we’ve got nothing left. Absolutely fuck all.

The difficulty is that we don’t tend to accept this particularly gracefully. We look at the things we haven’t done, decide that we can’t possibly stop now, and proceed to use whatever energy we have left to fight against our own exhaustion.

I’ve certainly done this myself. There are days when I know perfectly well that my capacity is close to zero, and yet some part of me still wants to insist that I should be able to function exactly as I did yesterday. But I’ve lived in this body and with this brain for long enough to know that I do get things done, and that belittling my need for downtime has never been a particularly successful strategy.

One of the difficulties with capacity is that we don’t always have a clear understanding of where it’s gone. We might wake up feeling exhausted even though we didn’t do anything particularly strenuous the day before. We might be perfectly capable of managing something quite complicated and then find ourselves completely defeated by the prospect of making dinner. Our different batteries don’t necessarily run down at the same speed, and they certainly don’t recharge according to a convenient timetable.

Perhaps my procrastination is telling me that I’ve reached capacity. And perhaps the most useful thing I can do at that moment is listen rather than fight it. Because either way the time will be spent not doing the thing. Might as well make it pleasant and restorative, rather than another self-loathing session that will leave me exhausted and feeling less than.

4. I need some fallow time

This is one of my favourite ways of thinking about procrastination, because I think we have a very peculiar relationship with the idea that thinking needs to be visible.

If you’ve ever been to Glastonbury Festival, you’ll know that every 5 years the festival takes a break to allow the land to recover. It’s called a fallow year, and it’s a rather beautiful reminder that you cannot keep demanding crops from the same soil indefinitely without giving it a chance to replenish.

I think our brains need fallow time too.

We have a tendency to imagine that thinking is something we do consciously, preferably while sitting at a desk, looking appropriately thoughtful and producing some kind of measurable output. But an enormous amount of our processing takes place outside our conscious awareness. We absorb information, make connections, revisit experiences and gradually assemble things that might not make sense to us until several hours, days or sometimes considerably longer afterwards.

There’s a reason so many of our best ideas seem to arrive in the bath, while walking the dog or in the middle of the night, rather than when we’re sitting at our desks desperately trying to come up with something brilliant.

Our brains have been doing the work, even if we haven’t been able to see it happening.

I find this particularly interesting because we are so obsessed with productivity that we struggle to recognise anything that doesn’t produce an immediate, visible result. If I’m sitting on the sofa staring into space, it’s very easy to decide that I’m wasting my time. But I have absolutely no idea what might be happening underneath that apparent inactivity.

Sometimes we need time to absorb what we’ve experienced, to let something land, to allow new connections to emerge. And sometimes we simply need to replenish the soil.

Now, I’m not suggesting that every afternoon spent watching Netflix is secretly producing some extraordinary intellectual breakthrough. Although, frankly, I wouldn’t rule it out.

What interests me is our insistence that we should be able to remain permanently productive, and the extraordinary amount of guilt we attach to the perfectly natural process of needing some downtime.

And here’s the particularly ridiculous part. When we do finally stop, we often spend the entire time beating ourselves up about having stopped. So instead of allowing ourselves to be fallow, we’re effectively standing in the middle of the field, shouting at the soil for not producing any fucking potatoes.

How’s that working out for us?

5. I’m scared of getting it wrong

This is where procrastination gets particularly interesting, because sometimes the thing we’re avoiding isn’t really the task itself, but what the task represents.

There might be a very good reason why we find ourselves unable to start something that we genuinely want to do. Perhaps the task exposes us to judgement, criticism, disappointment or the possibility that we won’t live up to our own expectations. Perhaps we’ve spent years receiving negative feedback about the way we do things, and we’ve learned that getting something wrong can be a rather painful experience.

Our brains are very good at remembering that sort of thing.

And this is where perfectionism comes into the picture. I’m going to give perfectionism its own article because I think there’s an enormous amount to unpack there, but one of the things that interests me most is the relationship between perfectionism and shame.

We often think of perfectionism as the pursuit of excellence, but what if we’re actually pursuing perfection because it offers us the promise of safety? If we do everything perfectly, nobody can criticise us, nobody can reject us and nobody can tell us that we’re not good enough.

It’s a rather seductive proposition, particularly if we’ve spent a lifetime being told that we need to try harder, do better or be different.

The problem, of course, is that perfection is a unicorn. We might occasionally experience extraordinary moments when everything aligns beautifully, but expecting to reproduce those moments every single time is a spectacularly effective way of making ourselves miserable.

And when the prospect of getting something wrong feels genuinely threatening, our brain might decide that the safest course of action is not to attempt it at all.

This is one of the reasons I’m so interested in the distinction between perfectionism and mastery. Mastery allows us to make mistakes, to experiment, to learn and to gradually develop our abilities. Perfectionism can make even starting feel dangerous, because the moment we start, we expose ourselves to the possibility of failure.

So perhaps the question here is whether we’re procrastinating because we don’t know how to do something, or because we’re frightened of what it might mean if we don’t do it perfectly.

And if it’s the latter, maybe we need to investigate the threat, rather than trying to frighten ourselves into action.

6. I don’t want to do this on your terms

Here’s another possibility that I think is particularly interesting for neurodivergent people: sometimes our procrastination might be telling us that we’ve lost our sense of agency.

We live in a world full of demands, expectations, obligations and instructions about what we should be doing, how we should be doing it and when it should be done. And if you’ve spent a substantial proportion of your life trying to comply with expectations that don’t necessarily work for your brain, you might have developed a rather complicated relationship with being told what to do.

Sometimes we find ourselves resisting something that we might otherwise have been perfectly happy to do, simply because it’s become an obligation.

And occasionally, the person doing the demanding is us.

We can be spectacularly good at turning things we actually enjoy into compulsory activities. We decide that we must exercise three times a week, write every morning, meditate for twenty minutes or engage in some other supposedly life-enhancing activity, and suddenly the thing that was supposed to make our lives better has become another bloody stick to beat ourselves with.

What interests me here is the difference between making a choice and feeling that we have no choice. In one, our sense of agency. There are plenty of things in life that we have to do, whether we particularly fancy doing them or not, but there’s often a little more room for agency than we initially recognise.

Perhaps we can’t choose whether to complete a particular task, but we might be able to choose when we do it, how we approach it, what support we need or whether somebody else could take on part of it.

And sometimes, of course, we might discover that we don’t actually need to do the thing at all.

I think there’s something worth investigating when we find ourselves repeatedly resisting a particular task or activity. Whose expectation are we trying to meet? Have we agreed to something that doesn’t work for us? Are we attempting to follow a method that might be perfectly sensible for somebody else but completely unsuitable for our own brain?

Maybe procrastination is giving us an opportunity to renegotiate the terms.

7. I’m stuck in the pressure cooker

And finally, there’s the particularly delightful situation in which the way we’re trying to overcome procrastination is actually making it worse.

I think many of us with ADHD have developed an interesting relationship with pressure. We know that urgency can sometimes provide the stimulation we need to get moving, and we’ve probably all experienced those extraordinary moments when a looming deadline suddenly enables us to accomplish something we’ve been putting off for weeks.

The difficulty is that we can become quite dependent on that particular method of getting things done.

We procrastinate, we feel guilty about procrastinating, we start worrying about the consequences of procrastinating, and gradually we build up enough pressure that we either manage to launch ourselves into action or find ourselves completely overwhelmed by the whole bloody business.

Sometimes it works. We get the thing done, feel an enormous sense of relief and congratulate ourselves on having pulled it off yet again. But we’ve also reinforced the idea that the way to make ourselves do something is to generate enough stress to force our brains into action.

And what happens when the pressure becomes too much?

We get stuck.

Then, because we’re stuck, we apply more pressure. We tell ourselves that we’re running out of time, that we’re being ridiculous, that we should have started hours ago, that we’re going to let everybody down and that we really are a fundamentally useless human being.

Out comes the stick again.

And the particularly frustrating thing about this is that we might be using up an extraordinary amount of energy without getting anywhere near the task itself. We’re certainly not doing nothing. We’re working incredibly hard at being horrible to ourselves.

Perhaps our procrastination is trying to protect us from the pressure we’re putting ourselves under, and our response is to turn the pressure up even further.

There’s a certain tragic comedy to the whole thing.

What if we stopped fighting it?

The thing that interests me most about all of these different experiences is that they can look remarkably similar from the outside. Whether I’m missing information, completely exhausted, frightened of being judged, resisting somebody else’s expectations or simply needing a bit of fallow time, the visible result might be exactly the same.

I’m not doing the thing.

And because I’m not doing the thing, I reach for the familiar explanation that I’m procrastinating, with all the judgement, shame and self-criticism that tends to accompany it.

But if procrastination is protective, then perhaps it deserves a little more curiosity.

I don’t mean that we should abandon everything the moment we experience a bit of resistance, or that procrastination is always a reliable guide to what we need. Our brains can be remarkably good at protecting us from things that aren’t actually dangerous, and sometimes the strategies we’ve developed to keep ourselves safe can become significant obstacles in their own right.

What I’m interested in is what happens when we stop treating procrastination as a moral failing and start recognising that there’s probably something worth investigating.

We can look at what’s happening, take stock of the conditions we’re operating in and start figuring out what might make things more accessible. Sometimes that will mean gathering information or breaking something down into smaller steps. Sometimes it will mean finding a different way of doing things, asking for support or allowing ourselves to make mistakes.

And sometimes it might mean doing absolutely nothing for a while.

This is where I come back to the idea of fallow time, because I think it illustrates something rather important about the way we treat ourselves.

Imagine you’ve spent an entire Monday unable to get started on something. You’ve sat on the sofa, wandered around the house, looked at your phone, made several cups of tea and periodically reminded yourself that you really ought to be getting on with it. By the end of the day, you’re exhausted, miserable and furious with yourself for having achieved precisely nothing.

Then on Tuesday, for reasons you can’t entirely explain, you sit down and get the thing done.

What if Monday was part of the process?

What if your brain needed that time to process, recover or replenish itself, and all the energy you spent beating yourself up about your apparent inactivity was simply making the experience considerably more unpleasant than it needed to be?

Of course, we can’t always know that Tuesday will be different, and I wouldn’t want to pretend that procrastination never has consequences. Sometimes those consequences are significant, and sometimes we genuinely need help finding a way through.

But there’s one thing I find particularly useful to remember: the time is going to pass anyway.

If I spend three hours fighting my procrastination, feeling increasingly ashamed and trying desperately to force myself into action, those three hours are gone. And quite possibly, I’ve got even less capacity available to me than I had when I started.

If, instead, I can recognise what’s happening and get curious about it, I might discover something useful. Perhaps I need a break, perhaps I need more information, perhaps I need some help, or perhaps my brain simply needs a chance to do whatever mysterious business it’s currently engaged in.

And even if I don’t immediately discover the answer, I can at least stop wasting quite so much energy attacking myself.

I think that’s ultimately what interests me about procrastination. We’ve become so accustomed to viewing it as something that needs to be defeated that we rarely stop to consider whether it might actually be trying to tell us something important about ourselves, our needs or the conditions we’re operating in.

And if we can start listening to that information, we have a much better chance of making choices that genuinely work for us.

So the next time you find yourself procrastinating, perhaps you could resist the temptation to reach for your favourite stick and put on your anthropologist’s hat instead.

How very interesting.

I wonder what’s going on here.